Mechanical coupling, architectural specialization, and human-scale vibroacoustics
This preprint has not been peer reviewed, and no institutional endorsement or archaeological expertise is implied. It grants a disputed premise deliberately, marks every claim by evidence class, and was produced with AI assistance - all disclosed inside the document.
The Giza pyramid complex presents several independently documented features whose physical consequences remain incompletely characterized: a measured dominant structural-response frequency of the Great Pyramid near 2.3 Hz; a systematic increase of relative spectral amplification with elevation, peaking near King's Chamber level; a repeated periodic architectural element (27 paired slots at ~1.7 m spacing) in the Grand Gallery; and disputed remote-sensing claims of deep structures beneath the Pyramid of Khafre.
This paper develops and attempts to falsify the hypothesis that the complex functioned as a coupled mechanical-resonant system. It does not claim that this hypothesis has been established. It asks a narrower question: if the disputed subsurface geometry beneath Khafre were independently confirmed, what engineering model would best account for the resulting system, and what observations could falsify that model?
Beginning from a hydraulic-resonator premise, we progressively test and discard several attractive interpretations - including the 648 m water-column explanation for the measured 2.3 Hz response, which is fully accounted for by ordinary structural dynamics. Two constrained, falsifiable predictions survive, and neither depends on the disputed subsurface claims: a Bragg-scale acoustic interaction near 99–100 Hz fixed by the Grand Gallery's documented slot periodicity, and a pre-registered similarity-null prediction of 4.6–5.2 Hz for Menkaure's fundamental - where a measurement near 2.3 Hz instead would reject that null and demand explanation.
We additionally document that the empirical record on pyramid vibro-acoustics is nearly empty: exactly one peer-reviewed instrumental dataset exists. Every proposed test in this paper is non-invasive, permit-scale, and unrun.